The Application Of Smartphone-aided Mobile Vocabulary Learning In Junior Vocational School

Vocabulary is not only the foundation of English but also the building block for the capacity of communication.However,learners,especially the vocational school students,usually have significant difficulty remembering large vocabularies.The students spend a great deal of time and energy in memorizing English words.but their vocabulary size is still very small,and then they have difficulty in listening,speaking,reading and writing,and gradually,their interest in English learning is weakened or even vanished.So vocabulary teaching and learning is a headache for both the teachers and the students in junior vocational school.With the development of the mobile technology and the wide popularity of smart phones,more and more researchers try to introduce smartphone-aided mobile language learning and have proved the effectiveness of mobile learning in different aspects.But is the smartphone-aided mobile vocabulary learning really more effective than the traditional vocabulary learning and what is the students attitude towards mobile vocabulary learning is still in question.So this paper tries to answer these questions by conducting an experoment under the following design.This study chose randomly two parallel classes(79 students)from Hanzhong Vocational and Technical College as subjects.The experiment lasted 12 weeks.During the experiment,the students in the experimental class learn the vocabulary on their smart phones by downloading "Baicizhan" and upload their learning records to their Wechat group,while the students in the control class learn the vocabulary in the traditional way.The teacher would check the Wechat group of the experimental class and dictation papers of the control class to monitor their learning process.After the experiment,the 79 students are asked to finish a post-test to see whether there is significant difference between their scores.Besides,the students in the experimental class are asked to finish a questionnaire and an interview in order to know their attitude and opinion on mobile learning.Results of pretest shows that student's performance in vocabulary proficiency is at the same level:mean in the EC is 43.05 while mean in the CC is 43.25.After the experiment,the students' vocabulary proficiency in the EC has improved significantly by 6.65 on average while the scores in the CC improved only by 0.26.Besides,the questionnaire and the interview showed that the majority of the students' attitude towards smartphone-aided mobile vocabulary learning is positive.Based on the results the author came up with the following conclusion:the smartphone-aided mobile vocabulary learning is more effective in improving students' vocabulary proficiency and most of the students are in favor of mobile vocabulary learning.So teachers can encourage students to learn vocabulary through their smart phones.Besides,the teacher could recommend different applications to different students since different students have different learning styles and different applications have different characteristics.Lastly,the teacher should strengthen the supervision during the process because junior vocational school students have relatively poor self-discipline.The study has its limitations which future study should try to avoid in order to find better approaches in vocabulary learning.